I was bit upset at the thought of losing Mindblast and Mindspike but the glyph of Atonement alongside the reduced cast time on Smite has allayed my fears a lot. The healing part of Atonement also procs our Holy Mastery and whilst in Smite Chakra we’ve got decent punch, especially for questing/grinding. Having Evangelism as a passive of course helps too and instant Holy Fire through the glyph is awesome.

Mass Dispel has what you might call a prohibitive mana cost right now, taking 45,800 mana per cast. On my mana pool (128k because I’m a lv 86 Gnome), I can manage two before having to wait for my mana to recover.

In fact I’d say mana in general is a bit of an issue, not so much for questing/dungeoning but definitely in things of a PvP nature. However I lost a decent chunk of my regen purely from transferring to the Beta and haven’t reforged anything yet. On top of this, it’s early on in the Beta and the game is not balanced around lv 86. I will however be paying close attention as we move towards to 90.

Right now, the prognosis for PvP doesn’t look good. In part due to two things, regen and the self healing of dps classes. I’m a firm believer in the fact that in a 1 v 1, the worst player should lose and right now, I’m not seeing how I as a Holy Priest could beat many dpsers in a one v one because their self healing owns my smite every time.

I’m looking forward to getting our lv 87 spell to see how that mixes things up, plus right now both our lv 15 talent cc spells and fear share the same cooldown. Hopefully that’s an oversight and if it is, fixing it would probably help quite a bit. Also a combination of things which include levelling and losing a wand slot has reduced my resilience by 10 percent which hasn’t helped.

Spells:

The way in which we enter Chakra states has been changed.

Now it works more like the Mage Portal system and I’m not convinced I like it. Drop down menus are not ideal for swift changing on the run in my opinion and so I’ll probably pop them all on keybinds. However I do love the fact that you don’t have to cast any spell first, it’s just a case of picking the right Chakra. Also to swap to another Chakra, you just click the one you want so it’s definitely an upgrade in terms of user friendliness.

Divine Hymn is currently rather lacklustre compared to it’s live version. At 86, it’s healing for around 13k (in Chakra Sanctuary) but Beta is Beta and numbers can easily be adjusted. It still has the 3 minute cooldown and given that it’s Holy only, balancing it should be easy.

At lv 86 they have 33370 k health, they don’t inherit our resilience and since I’ve crit for higher myself whilst in Smite Chakra, you can imagine what most dpsers will do to them. I tried testing them in a series of duels yesterday but because fellow Alliance players can’t attack them at the moment even whilst dueling it’s a little hard to come to any concrete conclusions. So far the only snare removal which worked was Escape Artist and they are lasting the full 20 seconds against players but I imagine these are bugs which will be ironed out way before Mists goes live. For PvE though, especially the first sets of heroic dungeons with dodgy tanks, I imagine these could be very handy indeed. They are also great for questing, given that they only have a 30 second cooldown.

Void Shift is my new favourite toy and despite being a bit concerned about it’s griefing potential in PvP, I think it’s a solid tool with lots of useful applications.

As you can see from this screenshot, you don’t need other players to be in the vicinity to benefit from it. So far I’ve tested it with my Void Tendrils, Basil the Shadowfiend and as shown here my Lightwell. As illustrated here, the health swap count as a heal as does the “then heal the lower health target by 25%” and therefore as Holy both proc our mastery (or at least it would have if I’d used it on something that can be healed).

You can make macros to use it quickly and efficiently too.

/target Lightwell
/cast Void Shift

Would be one example.

Edit: Unfortunately the next beta build “fixed” it so that Void Shift can only be cast on player party and raid members. Meaning that lightwell, tendrils, hunter’s pets, shadowfiends and the like are all out of the equation. You could still macro it to work with other players though.

All in all, I was really happy until I duelled people last night. I think we’ve still got a way to go but I’m really liking a few of the changes, including ones I thought I’d hate. I’d like to see Mind Control back as baseline and I still dislike Spirit of Redemption (also turning into an angel when you lose a duel but don’t die…… grr!) but other than that, considering how early a Beta phase it is, I’m feeling pretty positive.

I started out by trying Disc before switching back to my one and only love, Holy and I definitely think Holy is in the better place right now.